You poison my children and I do not seem to mind. I poison your children and you do not seem to mind. Thanks to me your aged mother runs a greater risk of dying of respiratory failure at the next heat wave but that's alright because, thanks to you, my mother runs the same risk. You breathe the air which has been run through the air cleaner in my car and I breathe the air carefully mixed with petrol or diesel in yours. We both breathe each other's exhaust fumes and we find that perfectly convenient.
Neither of us thinks much of the expense. Not really. The claims of injustice regarding exorbitant car registration taxes are mostly an expression of our wish to spend more, our chaffing at the fact that the tax burden prevents us having a bigger, shinier beast.
It is rarely the careful computation of those who resent the fact that such a vast segment of their income is devoted to their means of transport. Turning the key for the first time in your brand new pride-and-joy loses you around 10 per cent of what you pay to buy it.
In those few seconds, before you have moved a millimetre, in a car worth a mere €20,000, you have enjoyed €2,000 worth of undiluted pleasure. Never having had the experience myself, I am consumed by the curiosity of the innocent.
And it does not stop there. Whether your treasure is paid in cash or bought by hire purchase (and there is a huge difference), the total is subtly hiked up by the rate of income tax you pay.
Do you garage the precious thing? How much does that cost you per day? What fraction of the cost of your home is attributed to your garage? Did you buy or do you rent the place? It appreciates in value does it? Except that you will never realise your gains until you decide to get rid of your car.
There are also the annual tolls of insurance and road tax, a ticket or two, servicing and fuel, occasionally, parking fees. Meanwhile, the process which started when you first fired up the engine has carried on inexorably eating away at the value of your latter-day coach and horses.
Summed up by an expert friend of mine, it was all estimated to run up to €15 per day on a €20,000 car.
If, like me, you are a driving addict, you may be tempted to put the pleasure of driving into the scales. Unfortunately, there seems to be hardly anywhere left to put even the most modest of our darlings through its paces. I reckon that average driving speed has dropped far below 40kph, increasing the risk of accident by dropping off at the wheel through sheer boredom.
It must be torture for those who never liked driving in the first place. My heart also goes out to the owners of those over-engineered, mobile monuments to ostentatious imbecility who sit in air-conditioned embarrassment in traffic jam after traffic jam fully air-bagged and protected against high-speed impact which is never likely to happen unless they attempt suicide at some unique moment when the road is clear.
When justification by satisfaction fails, we turn to necessity. How would we get to work without our cars? How would we do the shopping? And how would we be able to ferry the kids from school, to private lessons or pick them up when they go out? What about those five-errand journeys altogether impossible by any other means? How would we go for a picnic otherwise? Poisoning one another at huge expense is an absolute necessity, isn't it?
Only because we have no other real choice at present. Only because we have designed our lives around car ownership allowing our destinations to spread far and wide. Only because we do not imagine putting our resources together to provide ourselves with alternatives. Only because nobody in authority has the stomach to broach the subject.
There exists an astounding array of alternatives to private car ownership, tried and tested elsewhere, which have never crossed the mind of anybody in Malta with the political power to reach out and make one possible. Malta is 24 kilometres long at its longest axis, Gozo about eight kilometres. The idea that we are left almost without any option other than the private car is simply mind-boggling.
Malta needs a mass transit system but we have not begun to talk about it yet. It could be by tram, overhead mono-rail or underground railway. It is still decades away because we were too busy to think for the last several decades.
The existing public transport network could be enormously improved by being decentralised and by developing circular routes linking regional localities.
There are several options in private mobility: from car pooling to timesharing vehicles, from pay-per-use vehicles linked to our mobile phones to chauffeur-driven luxury. All of which are miles cheaper than owning a car and just as flexible. Malta could very easily become the only country in the EU in which cars become almost exclusively weekend or pastime items but only if its 400,000 inhabitants decided that it would be a good idea.
Of course, there are an almost infinite number of challenges, systems to adjust and practices to change. How will wholesalers distribute their goods?
What about heavy vehicle traffic? How will sales assistants get around? Doctors doing their rounds? Were any traffic reduction measure ever to succeed, would that not ease pressure and restore our appetite for more cars?
Addressing them all will not address our rapid cultural mutation into a people expressing itself through its motor vehicle. It would take massive investment in a public education campaign to get us to shed our need to stun the neighbours by our extravagance, our exquisite taste in pollution source and our ability to customise the mass produced.
What else could stand a chance against the millions of euros spent each year indoctrinating the masses through car advertising, half-naked women sprawled over the bonnet of one of our ancient buses?
Is it not amusing that it is illegal to advertise cigarettes but perfectly legal to pitch the internal combustion engine?
It would be too much to expect any political party with 50 per cent plus electoral ambitions to even begin to hint at anything rational. In Malta, where it should be the easiest task of all, it is said to be risky even for the Greens to be so futuristic as to talk of reducing traffic significantly. If we get too far ahead of the field, our adversaries would have too easy a time making us out to be eccentric, far out and extremist.
Still, this is precisely our function: to point out the obvious facts that few people are willing to acknowledge; to point out the very long-term policy options; to have a vision which is not a regurgitation of the past; to propose today what our adversaries will make their own only decades in the future. We have more or less done away with the habit of buying our cars second hand. How about getting our politics first hand for a change?
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